I recently upgraded my system, and I have also been given a variety of machines that no one wants any more. From the available resources, I have put together four working systems. One I use on a regular basis, one is part of a project I'm working on, and two are merely collecting dust, or would be if I didn't keep a cloth over them. All are in perfect working order. I know what my friends and acquaintances do with their computers, and they are not power users. The fact that hardware like this is going into the landfill has made me skeptical about what, exactly, people are accomplishing when they pay several hundred dollars for a new machine. I know why I upgraded, but I suspect a lot of people don't.
A couple of the machines I used to build the ones below came to me with non-working components and a great deal of accumulated dust. I think the owners may have run into overheating problems and a mental block against taking the cover off the case to perform even simple replacements or repairs. I also saw hdds that had been left unwiped and were infested with spyware and other problems to the point where the OS would have been almost unusable.
Glamor box
This is the best of the dust collectors. It has an Abit motherboard with the nvidia nforce 2 chipset and an Athlon XP 1600+, tucked inside a case from another machine that had a dead motherboard. I have equipped it with 640mb of RAM and an nvidia 440mx graphics card with 64mb of RAM. I have overclocked everything substantially, but it is stable in both Windows and Linux (Fedora Core 3). The Quake 4 demo runs quite well on this machine, although it falls short of the minimum specs listed by the publisher. I think I will be able to give this one away.
Media box
This is my old machine in a more compact case, with a quick-and-dirty side vent and fan that I added. It has the Via PM266 chipset, a 2.6ghz Celeron, 500mb RAM, and the 128mb AIW 9600, which I bought for my new machine but was not quite satisfied with. It also has a Creative Soundblaster Live card. I am getting some other parts together so I can use it as a media system.
Utility Box
This dust collector is a stock Dell with a 450mhz Pentium 3, 320mb of RAM, and a 64mb nvidia graphics card. If someone comes along wanting a machine for word processing, Internet, and similar tasks, this will do. I use it occasionally to test hardware components.
Kiddie box/DOS box
I cobbled this machine together from the parts bin last winter. It has an AMD k6-2 350mhz processor, an Elpina board with a Chips & Technologies chipset, 160mb of RAM, and a 16mb ATI graphics card in the AGP slot. I have set it up with a FreeDOS partition containing a number of free and abandoned games, all legal to the best of my knowledge. One of its jobs is to amuse kids who drop by, which accounts for its silly appearance. I also have a Windows 98 (98 Lite) partition and XOSL to choose my OS when I boot. I still need real DOS and the backward compatibility of 9x for certain things, and I use this machine quite a bit. It is very fast with the software I'm running. It lacks a mouse port, so I use a serial port mouse.